Amazon Web Services’ second-annual re:Invent user conference kicks off on Tuesday, and the scale of the thing speaks volumes of just how pervasive cloud computing has become. I’ve been to dozens of user conferences in this city by companies such as IBM, HP, VMware, CA and Tableau, and re:Invent in its first year was seemed about as big as any of them. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in a few years, it’s one the biggest tech-company conferences anywhere.

AWS deserves a lot of credit for building a generally great computing platform, but its real success came via its ability to appeal to developers. It’s the platform that launched a thousand — nay, a million — applications and, perhaps more importantly, inspired an entirely new way of thinking about serviced-oriented architecture and composable applications. The next generation of applications will look very little like their predecessors, and it’s as much because of how they’ll be built as it is because of where they’ll be hosted.